There are plenty of videotapes featuring highlights of the real Andy Kaufman in many of his varied innovative and often controversial comedy routines and TV specials.

Man on the Moon is really nothing more than another of these, except that it features Jim Carrey doing impersonations of Kaufman in most of those same routines.

That is hardly what would normally be described as a biographical movie. While Carrey is very good at playing Kaufman, there is little in the film that provides a deeper understanding of Kaufman as a person, something that anyone who even had a passing interest in the curious comedian would like to have learned.

Instead, for two hours we get a series of vignettes of Kaufman's amusing and sometimes bizarre career incidents, including his inexplicable creation of the abrasive Tony Clifton alter-ego lounge singer and his obsession with wrestling women, which led to that infamous -- fact or fiction? -- grudge match with pro wrestler Jerry Lawler.

Although there seems to have been an effort to lend some realism to the movie by having the real cast members of Taxi -- Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Christopher Lloyd, Jeff Conaway and Carol Kane -- play themselves, and David Letterman and Lawler reprise the program in which Lawler hit Kaufman and knocked him out of his chair, the casting strategy actually serves as more of a distraction. Letterman is not made up at all and so appears strangely contemporary for an event that happened nearly two decades ago.

And the viewer will spend too much time trying to figure out how Taxi co-star Danny DeVito is going to show up with his fellow former actors from the show when DeVito is busy portraying Kaufman manager George Shapiro.

It all adds up to an unsatisfying movie experience, and one that fails to illuminate the enigmatic "man on the moon" or the motivation behind any of his career choices or characters.

The disappointment is more keenly felt since director Milos Forman has been responsible for some great character studies, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus and The People Vs. Larry Flynt.